Read a Banned Book
Every year at this time we pour out a tall glass of apple cider and celebrate us some good reading, thanks to "Banned Book Week" and the American Library Association.
Of course, it's not the attempts at book banning that we celebrate, but, as the ALA puts it, we are "celebrating the freedom to read".
It's odd to look at the list of frequently challenged books — "challenged" because front-line librarians are often able to beat back the challenges from the ignorant to keep the books on their shelves — and reflect on what they might have in common.
The one characteristic I can find that seems common to all is that each one deals in ideas, and some people are uncomfortable with unfettered access to ideas. Governments, religions, and controlling parents are sometimes overcome by the threat they perceive from ideas, ideas that might subvert their authority by leading readers to think. Thinking, for some, is very scary indeed.
Thinking about ideas vigorously and freely is refreshing, stimulating, makes one grow and keeps one alive. One can embrace and celebrate the exhilaration that comes from a diversity of ideas, or one can fret and snarl and snap and become morally and intellectually diminished. Myself, I'm pretty clear about choosing the diversity-of-ideas route.
From the list of "100 most frequently challenged books: 1990–1999" I found fewer titles than I had hoped that I have already read. Clearly I have some reading cut out for me. The ones I've read:
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
24. The New Joy of Gay Sex, by Charles Silverstein
40. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
43. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
54. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
67. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
81. Carrie, by Stephen King
83. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
I liked and admired all of them, except for Carrie.
I did rather better from their list of "Banned and Challenged Classics", thanks largely to Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Mitchell.
I think maybe I'll add writing a banned book to my bucket list.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 at 21.19
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I find book banning a disgusting practice in any case. But when someone wants to ban "To Kill a Mockingbird," they might as well put on a T-shirt proclaiming their bigotry.
on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 at 22.00
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It can take a long time to work, but most bigotry contains the seeds of its own self-destruction.